Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
If you know what happened in that opening sentence then good on you because I have trouble following it after the sixth buffalo. Gather round everyone, it's time to talk about grammar.
Journalists know a little something about constrained writing - well, Norm Park isn't very familiar with constraint - but that doesn't mean we are allowed to produce something as head scratching as the buffalo line. It explains how buffalo from Buffalo who are buffaloed by other buffalo from Buffalo also buffalo buffalo from Buffalo. Did that clear everything up? It's a little cyclical.
The buffalo sentence is incredibly constricted by rules, even though it appears to be completely anarchic.
Another very simple sentence that could be used along the same lines could be, "Police police police."
The topic of the grammatically correct buffalo sentence came up while talking to a friend who pointed out there is a Mandarin poem, originally written in classical Chinese, in which every sound is shi. It's called Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. It's 92 characters long (which for us would mean about 92 words long) and that's a whole lot of shi.
It just goes to show how the Chinese beat us at every game we try to play.
Grammar was always kind of fun in a weird way. I remembering it being incredibly tedious when we covered it in Grade 9 English class, but when I enrolled in a journalism program at college, we had to take more grammar. Here we were, a group of adults planning on writing for a living, learning about nouns. We started from the very beginning.
We moved fast, and our professor, the only one we had who forbid us from calling her by her first name, had some fun with it.
I liked the rules that appeared to have no rhyme or reason. When listing a group of adjectives before a subject, it's tall, blonde Swedish man and it just is because it is. There's no rule to follow there. It just is whatever sounds right and Swedish, blonde, tall man does not sound right.
The important difference between an "adult-movie theatre," and an "adult movie theatre" is another one she loved to spout off.
She never called up a student that I'm aware of, but she would threaten to call and ask, "Is that you?"
If we answered with a gruff, "Ya, s'me," instead of a melodic, "'Tis I," she might have lost her mind.
In Canadian journalism, we don't use the Oxford comma, which is the comma used before a conjunction and the final item in a list. While we don't use it, there are instances in which it would still make sense to.
An example I've seen is, "To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God," something Paul Ryan would probably say.
When changed to "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God," it could be confused that Ayn Rand and God are in fact, the parents. I haven't written that sentence while working at a newspaper yet, but if it ever comes up, I hope we can avoid any confusion from the readers. I've never been much for dedicating things, but there are many other examples that could lead to raised eyebrows.
If anybody can come up with some more sentences in which one word is used multiple times, I'd love to hear them. Please send them to jbaker@estevanmercury.ca
